Hubris and Humility in Environmental Thought in The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann. London: Routledge, 2017. 247–257. Download from Academia.edu.
In this essay, I examine the rhetorical dynamics of the hubris-humility dyad that has structured much environmentalist thought from Stewart Brand and Wendell Berry’s debates about space colonies in the CoEvolution Quarterly in the 1970s to current arguments about conservation in the Anthropocene, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus’s polemics, the Ecomodernism Manifesto, and the Dark Mountain Project. I argue that scholars in the environmental humanities should pay attention to the urgency of concepts of hubris and humility, and narratives and practices that reclaim or revise them, despite their inadequacies.
Image from the spring 1976 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly, available via the Whole Earth Index and Internet Archive.
Michelle Niemann 